Month: July 2016

My friend Adam has hit upon a quite nice little idea in his translating of the Aeneid. The general idea is that Vergil is a cynic who ends all his most epic scenes by throwing shade on them. I’ll let Adam speak for himself on the details, but I was pleased to play a small auxiliary role in the hashing out of the idea.

Initially I resisted his take on the pictura inani, or empty picture, that Aeneas used to feed his soul. Why not instead stay local and contrast Aeneas feeding his soul (animus) with a soulless (inane) picture? But once we got talking, his cynical read started to grow really nicely.

While Adam ran off to do some real work (prep for a class), I played the role of research assistant gunning down every use of the adjective inanis in the Aeneid. Again, God bless the internet. And indeed, it is quite remarkable how often inanis shows up just in an amateur little word search, and what it ends up modifying (hope, rage, tears, etc.).

Continuing my flogging of the issue: is it the essence of a mathematical proof to be persuasive, such that someone who fails to persuade has failed to engage in “mathing?”

I ran across this fun little Numberphile video which raises in passing an interesting and important point. Fermat came up with an idea (not his super-famous one) about some primes being the sum of two squares (like 17=16+1). What the video goes on to mention is that many mathematicians after Fermat–the super-heavyweights like Euler and Gauss and Dedekind and Co.–all came up with proofs of this idea.

Each of those proofs is different. Very different. If the goal of mathematical proof were simply to persuade, the proofs would be valued for getting different “mathematical demographics” to agree to the truth of the conclusion. Or perhaps, even more simply, one could insist that everyone should agree to the conclusion of the first, rational proof and then get on with life.

But this is not the role of mathematical proofs, any more than it is the role of the scientific method or logical argumentation. The various proofs are valued because each of them illuminates different aspects of the problem as well as different areas of the wide world of mathematics. Continue reading Is Math Persuasive?

Why should I think artificial intelligence is on the near horizon when we can’t even make artificial animals?

Teaching is not like astronomy. It’s like saddle-making. You know, except with living beings instead of leather.

(Almost?) every child I’ve ever taught has or will turn out just fine. Not all of them will do it at my school though.

Teaching grammar functionally is one of the most colossal mistakes American “grammarians” could have made. It’s like teaching algebra before arithmetic. Actually, now that I think of it, we have some pretty bad ideas about basic maths too.

Learning Latin would be a lot easier if my students knew English.

Justice is the state of affairs where I get my way vs. Justice is the habit by which I happily give others what is theirs.

Pokemon Go is going to be the downfall of human civilization. Pure, unadulterated cupidity unchained. At least we have the solar flares to save us some day.

One day I will have all the time in the world to develop notes into topics and write on them at length.

There, I said it. Irrational numbers cannot exist as magnitudes of length or weight or whatever in the world of mobile substance. My stock example: you can never forge a sword with a blade whose length is √2 feet.

(Aside: that’s a gimmick in a to-be-written short story of mine–a magical Sword of Impossibility whose blade really is √2 feet in length and instantly annihilates whatever it cuts.)

Primes are the delightful irreducibles of the number world. As a kid I thought of them as weird exceptions to good, common-sense mathematics–the kind of things you memorized and played goofy games with. But that has things almost backwards.

The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic says that any integer can be expressed as a unique prime factorization (this is what Brandon was posting about, so I shan’t repeat him). Said in reverse, primes are the building blocks of the number world. Everything traces back to them. That got me thinking about primes as an example of first movers like one would use to explain the First Way or STA’s explanation of the act of the will. Continue reading Prime Movers

More clearly: is the scientific method essentially persuasive in nature?

Hold your horses; this isn’t a conspiracy theory/Scientology/anti-immunization blog. I just mean: has a scientist who fails to persuade people actually failed to use the scientific method?

Consider any school child’s version of the scientific method: something along the lines of observation-hypothesis-experiment-conclusion or however they are teaching the kids these days. I don’t even remember how many versions of the thing I learned as a child and I’m sure the variations have proliferated in the decades since.

What I am asking is: does “persuade” belong on that list somewhere? So that after your experiment or conclusion, if you fail at the persuasion stage, you have to go back and rethink the hypothesis or whatever. “Some people don’t think I’m right. Guess I have to start again.”

The answer is obviously no, right? Except I teach kids, and I read things on the internet, and if that has taught me anything it’s that “obviously” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I’m sub-tweeting my real topic, by the way. Give me a minute.

The essence of the scientific method–what it really is, if it has any legitimacy at all–is to explore, uncover, and make plain the causes of observed phenomena. We could generalize it to just causes and effects, but usually we have in mind chemistry, biology, geology, etc. involving the observable, the in-principle-quantifiable, the material. In any case, persuasion has nothing to do with it:

It is obvious that someone could faithfully execute the scientific method in their backyard and never tell anyone about it. They have done science.

It is obvious that someone could faithfully execute the scientific method and publish a paper that no one can understand. They have done science.

It is obvious that someone could faithfully execute the scientific method and publish a paper that divides the scientific community. They have done science.

It is obvious that someone could faithfully execute the scientific method and publish a paper that persuades everyone except for the world’s leading expert on the topic. They have done science.

If you want to be a forensic accountant (or learn to foil forensic accountants), check this out. Ok, or if you just like numbers! I saw a few videos on Benford’s Law and picked what I thought was the simplest to follow. A very cool, very interesting property of numbers.

I wondered, less mathematically and more philosophically, if the strong “preference” for 1 has to do with the way we construct or think about units. But this is just a quick post, not a think piece, and the video speaks for itself nicely.

Terrific article in the WaPo by Dan Steinberg on UMD’s new football coach. It grabbed my eye initially because of its take on leadership (I was converting to school), but it’s also got some nice thoughts on writing process. Definitely worth a read, and easily reached with some Google-fu if that link dies. I hit it with the old C&P hex so I could sift it for quotes and ideas later.

I have toyed with the notion of keeping a “When I Am King” file that would be similar to this, except I have no delusions of grandeur (pertaining to running a school, at least!). But still, I am inspired:

Durkin never discussed the spiral notebook he began keeping with that head coach, a guy named Urban Meyer. He didn’t discuss it with his fellow assistants either. As Durkin flew through the coaching ranks — from Bowling Green to Notre Dame back to Bowling Green, and then to Stanford and Florida and Michigan — his original notebook became two, and then four, and then 10.

The lessons from Meyer were soon supplemented with the thoughts of Jim Harbaugh and Will Muschamp, Tyrone Willingham and Gregg Brandon, and with observations from outside of football, too. The notebooks went in a bin that accompanied Durkin and his family as they moved around the country, with the most recent ones remaining in his office. And before he interviewed for the Maryland opening, Durkin did what he always figured he would: He took out his old notebooks to review those lessons about building a college football program he’d been storing up for 15 years.

“I’m going into a meeting and talking about how I’m going to run a program; I’ve got to gather my thoughts, and so it forces you to go back through some things,” the 38-year old Durkin said on a recent morning in his office. “It’s like: ‘Here are my thoughts, here’s what I believe in.’ … You’ve got to have a clean viewpoint in your own mind of how this thing’s going to go, a baseline of core values and organization that you’re always going to go back to.”

The lessons cover all sorts of topics: running staff meetings and dealing with players, handling recruiting and dishing out discipline, creating handouts and crafting talking points. He always has used his notes as a coaching reference point, but it’s happened even more frequently in the hectic months since his hiring.